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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

As a software engineer, you recognize at some point that there's much more to your career than dealing with code. Is it time to become a manager? Tell your boss heâs a jerk? Join that startup? Author Michael Lopp recalls his own make-or-break moments with Silicon Valley giants such as Apple, Netscape, and Symantec in Being Geek -- an insightful and entertaining book that will help you make better career decisions.

Decide what you're worth with the chapter on "The Business"

Determine the nature of the miracle your CEO wants with "The Impossible"

Give effective presentations with "How Not to Throw Up"

Handle liars and people with devious agendas with "Managing Werewolves"

Realize when you should be looking for a new gig with "The Itch"

With more than 40 standalone stories, Lopp walks through a complete job life cycle, starting with the job interview and ending with the realization that it might be time to find another gig. Many books teach you how to interview for a job or how to manage a project successfully, but only this book helps you handle the baffling circumstances you may encounter throughout your career.

The first few chapters brought me up to speed on Python itself. The chapters which dealt with PyQt were of course the most detailed and the most useful. I found myself getting frustrated with the "Dance of the Seven Veils": the book would touch on a topic briefly, explain how important it was, give an example, then hurry away to cover something else. By the time we got to the meaty, more thoroughly-explored examples, I was confused and slightly lost. Google filled in the gaps, so in the end it was all worth it.

All things considered, I think that Summerfield's book was worth the money. It rarely leaves my desk and never sits on my bookshelf. That's how useful it is to me.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Is your email list responsive enough? If not, then consider that this is an issue that is directly related to your relation with it. What do your emails contain? If they’re flooded of multipurpose information, that entices your readers, fine, but if they’re unattractive, you’ve got no chance.

Remember that your subscribers have enrolled in your list as they require high caliber content, and you told them you could cater it - otherwise why would they be with you? Also, you are being judged on your quality. You can see that if you start to give poor content, and rehashed products or information that is confused with poor grammar, it will be a their assumption that your products are of the same quality.

Your goal is to furnish your email list building with the kind of information that is easy to understand, new, and that readers can put to work immediately – and that’s before they’ve even seen your offers! When they can act – with success - on what you tell them in your emails, then they’ll start to warm to you and be more disposed to come to you when you begin offering them low-end ticket products.

Is email list building easier said than done?

No, but you must take an nimble approach

As you’re an expert in your niche, there’s no reason why you can’t write quality content in most of your emails.

Write in an simple style. Your composition should be in the context that would allow them to feature it in a easygoing manner over a cup of coffee with you. Your grammar should be free flowing and at every costs, jargon-free and non-technical.

Discreetly place a link to your website in say 20% of your emails. Don’t plaster your creation in their faces every day. That is not the way to build a list, your email should be a pleasure for them to read. Think most what comes into YOUR inbox? Do you enjoy reading them, or feel like unsubscibing?

Yes, your telecommunicate rate depends on the nature of the niche – and the subscriber’s frame of mind too. At he beginning of creating your relationship, when everything is fresh, mail up to 5 emails maybe. Then as you start to know one another, assist up a little, as they’ll come to recognize you. If you send emails that provide heaps of sound content though, then don’t be shy in sending more to them. Sending a new income stream letter every day leaves you without some subscribers at all, so just be sensible, and everything should be fine.

Put your self in the mind of the recipient, and communicate if you’d be happy to act on your email. How would it attain your attention - excited, or trashing it?

Above all, impact your readers as you would like to be treated yourself – with respect. Because that way, building your list works for everyone involved.

Once you become their "authority" to go to, your potential to sell to them becomes greatly increased. You would not try to sell turtle food to somebody who doesn't own a turtle, just like your customers would not buy turtle food from somebody who does not own a turtle themselves.

Monday, March 29, 2010

If your a blogger starting out, or maybe have several blogs, or your just deciding which widgets to use in your new Wordpress blog, a few tips can help you out. Knowing how the search engines work can greatly improve your success. If a search engine comes across duplicate content while searching your links on your site, this will give each link less "link juice" as the experts call it. Why? because it is indexing the same content twice.

So, if you are using a tag cloud, and each tag only refers to 1 article, then the content will be counted multiple times. Removing the Tag Cloud could greatly improve your SE scores, as each post content will only be indexed possibly three times (once on the main page till it falls off, once on a category page, and once for the post's page). This is a good reason to make sure you post often, so that articles never stay on the front page for too long. Include an "Archives" link so that the SE can find the older posts.

If your blogging about a single topic, rather than a couple, it may even be a good idea to remove the Category menus. This will again reduce the number of times the content is "seen". If you do use categories, be sure the category is in the Title of the page first, and in the description meta tag. The description tag should be unique to this category.

Once you have hundreds of posts on the same topics and tags, you may be able to re-introduce the tag-cloud if the number of tags is small. Overall it helps if each blog is concentrating on a small topic as this will reduce the categories, and tags. Never place a post in more than one category.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

So, I was screwing around on the internet today, and I came across an amazing video. The guy in the video said his method can get you ranked within 1min! This was truely something to see. So, I tried it out myself.... I wasn't ranked in the top ten in 1min but how a few short hours??? I'm between bizrate and walmart ?? If this is possible then how? Above and below are the screenshots showing page 1 my Keywords, and clicking through the page showing my affiliate link for Amazon. If you think it's cause it's a long tail keyword, the last pic shows page 3. Here is a Link to the search ... Let me know how I'm doing :)

I was testing if this would actually work really quick so most of the content is ripped (and credited as best I could) to the Amazon site. Shortly after I got home, I recieved an email from xomba saying my account was blocked :) ... but oddly ... my pages are still there and my links too! Fun times :)

Saturday, January 23, 2010

1) Netbeans 6.8 PHP Bundle - Having switched from Eclipse to Netbeans several times over my career I was familiar with both Netbeans and Eclipse, and Eclipse based IDE's such as Aptana. However, when I recently installed the new Netbeans 6.8 PHP bundle I was very impressed. I have switched from Aptana Studio to the new Netbeans for my PHP and Javascript work for primarily 1 reason. I lets me be lazy, and lazy on this blog means efficient.

Netbeans 6.8 integrates with phpunit, picks up TODO markers, and knows what symfony is. Creating Unit tests is a snap, and Netbeans will give code coverage results. The suggestions, I found, were mostly right on the money, with the exception of some complex JavaScript objects. It also has a full library of Web Services.

At any method use, I can right click and go to the declaration, or the test case or simply refactor. All in all I found this IDE to be cleaner, and more user friendly than Eclipse or Aptana and it allows me to work on the things I need to work on rather than monkey around with settings and windows.

2) Aptana Studio still has it's uses. I primarily use this for Adobe Air projects as it streamlines the whole process down nicely. It also has the main javaScript Frameworks already built in. You can choose from YUI, jQuery, MooTools, ExtJs, etc .. and it will build it right into your app with fairly decent code complettion.

3) Eclipse I think is for the multitasker. Little Java here, little php there, sprinkle some python and C++ .. with its wide arsenal of IDE choices and plugins, it makes it the ideal work platform. Getting everything to work together sometimes though can be a challenge.

Monday, January 18, 2010

To begin, I wanted to post, if it wasn't obvious from other posts, my setup previously and the kinds of tools I am using and want to use.

Selenium Grid

CruiseControl with phpUnderControl

ant for build tasks

Several VM's running various browsers and Selenium RC

PHPUnit v 3.3.15 (more one this)

PHP 5.2.10

symfony framework v 1.2

Doctrine 1.1

The projects I am working on range from simple to enterprise level, and it was at the enterprise level that I needed a high degree of reliability and reporting. Also, it has to be simple, and easy to manage (cause I don't have time to be creative).

Symfony comes with the lime testing framework, and I use this as a way to "unit test" my controllers/actions. Most of my applications however have a high degree of Javascript built into them, making calls, updating the DOM, and I need to test this in as many browsers as possible.

Problems I ran into:

New versions of PHPUnit (3.4) have removed the capability to log the test runs to a database without replacing these features in other products (phpc, phpuc etc)

If the code running the unit test doesn't log this information anymore how would you get accurate code coverage results without running the tests again.

Complex XML logs are bulky and eat up disk space, and need to be rotated and managed. Not to mention, they are not human readable, so need to be parsed and exported into reports.

Selenium Grid would hang occasionally if the browser gets in a bad state.

Other php unit testing frameworks do not integrate nicely with Selenium

No way to easily store historic logs or screenshots in a logical manner.

Just no "central" one tool to run, log, and view all the testing data.

Since PHPUnit has removed the capability to log test runs in a database, and would rely on XML files in the future, I found this to be bulky and cumbersome. I would not be upgrading to the latest versions and instead be continuing to use the older versions that have this feature. This is a hard choice as I really wanted some of the newer features (grouping, required tests etc).

I needed a solution that I could setup quickly to replace my existing setup, without all the hassle that CruiseControl has (java server that is a memory hog). So, I decided to use the same tools that I use for development, and create a frontend to the PHPUnit database schema in 3.3.15. This is easily accomplished with Doctrine and Symfony.

I ran the provided schema from phpunit in SQLite 3, placed the database in the /data directory, setup my database.yml file and ran the build-schema build-model command. I now had classes that mapped to the PHPUnit schema for logging.

I also setup a symfony task to execute phpunit using the sfPhpunit Plugin as well. Word of caution: this pulgin needs to be worked on to work correctly, and needs some extra work to accept several parameters. Mainly, I needed the test database parameters, the xml configuration file to use, and the bootstrap arguments. This was all easily added to the task, and the output is captured into the database.

From there, I created all the admin modules, as well as a few frontend modules to view the test runs in reports that made sense.